Aylmer Vance, Ghost-Seer - Alice and Claude Askew

All literary collaborations seem odd in the age of the single author, but no collaboration has been as unusual or as productive as that of the Askews. They were astonishingly prolific over a short period - up to ninety novels in a 13-year period, glamorous (both born into money) and brave. The last characteristic warrants a sentence all its own. In a forgotten niche of World War 1 they volunteered to the cause of Serbia (also interesting because a lot of British lesbians enlisted as men in the Serbian army) and died when their ship was torpedoed by a U-boat in 1917.

Aylmer Vance was their attempt to cash in on the short-lived psychic detective fad of the pre-war period, kicked off by Hodgson's Carnacki and Blackwood's Dr John Silence. The stories appeared in a weekly story magazine and there are only eight of them. Do not be fooled in this respect. No amount of re-titling can increase the number and "Alymer Vance and the Vampire" is one of them.

The stories are narrated by Vance's amanuensis Dexter, a barrister. Unlike Dr Watson, Dexter has a gift which makes him useful to Vance. He is clairvoyant. Vance is posh, with a country manor and a Mayfair flat. He is a bachelor though, cunningly, this seems to be because he is in love with a Georgian ghost. There is also a rather clever continuity device. Vance and Dexter get to know one another on a fishing holiday, and only after Dexter has demonstrated his clairvoyance does Vance ask him to move in with him and become his investigative assistant. Where Carnacki devotes himself to debunking sham ghosts and Silence is preoccupied with natural forces, Vance favours the historical. When not busy ghost-seeing he travels the world visiting archaeological digs. Thus the first story, 'The Invader', is about a Celtic warrior princess. 'The Stranger' is, quite frankly, a god. The best Carnacki stories are the ones in which the ghost is genuine, whereas with Vance it's the other way round. 'The Indissoluble Bond' is an a awful title but it is a cracking story featuring a burst of Chopin's Funeral March at a wedding.

Only 8 stories means that the collection only lasts 120 pages, which isn't enough. On the other hand, they are all high quality and brilliantly written.

The Complete John Silence Stories - Algernon Blackwood

Blackwood was nudging forty when he made his name with the 1908 short story collection John Silence - Physician Extraordinary. He lived for another forty-three years, became a voice on radio and a skeletal face on early TV, but the first decade of the Twentieth Century was his most productive.

The 'extraordinary' thing about John Silence is that he is a psychic doctor. The tendency has been to class him as a psychic detective like Hodgson's Carnacki (interestingly commissioned by their mutual publisher when it became obvious no more Silence material would be forthcoming) but that is not the case. In some of these stories Silence is little more than a bit-part player, brought on at the end to cure the occult affliction. He is really a therapist, showing victims how to cure themselves, or a consultant brought in to take drastic action. To solve a mystery as a detective is to discover the truth; John Silence, adept in the occult arts and practices, already knows the answer.

The original five stories from Physician Extraordinary are all here in the original order, plus "A Victim of Higher Space" which may have been written alongside the others but which wasn't published until Day and Night Stories in 1917. One thing should be stressed, these are not short stories. They are all around 40 pages save for 'The Camp of the Dog' which is nearly 60. This is important because the long form allows Blackwood to build his horror in layers. Nothing in itself is especially shocking but the cumulative mass really gets into the reader's psyche.

Two of the stories particularly enthralled me, 'Ancient Sorceries' and 'Secret Worship'. Silence is the protagonist in neither; he is just someone who the protagonist confides in. This is good because Silence is a bit of a superhero - hugely wealthy and impossibly learned. He can never be in much jeopardy, so to hook the reader someone else has to be. In 'Ancient Sorceries' it is 'little Vezin ... a timid, gentle, sensitive soul' who finds himself marooned in a rural French town where the locals celebrate the titular sorceries and transform themselves into cats. In 'Secret Worship' it is Harris, a silk merchant,  who decides to visit the school he hated as a boy. The school is in southern Germany, run by monks. Harris is made welcome, which turns out to be a very bad thing for poor Harris.

To us, the idea of Victorian tradesmen being educated in Germany seems odd, but it is Blackwood's personal story. He was a perpetual traveller from childhood and is perhaps best known today for tales like 'The Wendigo' which brought Gothic horror to the vast open spaces of Canada, where Blackwood spent much of his twenties. Here, Canada is the setting for 'The Camp of the Dog'. Blackwood was also a member of the Golden Dawn, with Yeats and Mathers, Crowley and Arthur Machen, hence his taste for ancient ritual and, indeed, devil worship. Given the extraordinary nature of the author's life - the first half of it, anyway - S T Joshi's introduction to the collection is essential.

The book is a curiosity, but it is essential for anyone interested in that singular period between roughly 1890 and 1914 when occultism and ritual magic were actually fashionable.

Masters of Terror Volume 1 - William Hope Hodgson

It's interesting that Corgi chose Hodgson for the first in its Masters of Terror series back in 1977. He was out of copyright by then, of course, and one cannot be a paperback master when they still have to pay royalties. Interest in Hodgson had revived earlier in the decade when one of his Carnacki stories was dramatised in Hugh Greene's TV series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, but I suspect it was the reappraisal of H P Lovecraft that was going on at the same period which led to this publication, because it was Lovecraft who first described Hodgson as a master.

The introduction is by Peter Tremayne, who can always be counted on to do his homework. OK, he is slightly wrong about the dates of Hodgson's apprenticeship at sea - but I only discovered the real dates thanks to being able to view the actual documents online. Tremayne has seen publications which I haven't but will do now.
He discusses the seven stories and the reasons for their inclusion in short but effective order. 'A Tropical Horror' from 1904 was Hodgson's second published story and his first in the genre he was to make exclusively his own - sea-horror. 'The Voice in the Night' is another such, as is 'The Mystery of the Derelict', which Tremayne considers a classic. The fourth story - 'The Terror of the Water-Tank' - is here because it is one of Hodgson's rare attempts at land-based horror. I'm afraid I found it trivial.
The narrator of 'The Finding of the Graiken', one of Hodgson's Sargasso Mythos stories, was too like the narrator of 'The Terror of the Water-Tank' to hold my attention - a middleclass lightweight who does not personally confront the horror. In that respect Hodgson's most effective form was one he hit upon almost from the start: get the hero to spot the horror in the first few paragraphs, then have him confront it face to face (always supposing the horror has a face) and survive to tell us the tale. That is why, in my opinion, 'The Stone Ship' is my favourite in this collection. I had not come across it before - hadn't even heard of it - but it is classic Hodgson: a young hand spots a mysterious wreck, a search party goes aboard and confronts a truly ghastly horror which is revealed in a spectacularly gruesome manner.
The final story, clumsily called 'The Derelict' and thus easily confused with the earlier story, is included because it combines the sea-horror of Hodgson's early period with the science-fiction otherworldly horror of his masterpiece novel The House on the Borderland and the last, still controversial epic The Night Land.

All in all, then, a great introduction to the signature work of an undervalued writer with a useful and authoritative introduction to point you in the right direction for further exploration.

The House on the Borderland - William Hope Hodgson

Mr Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality.  Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connexion with regions or buildings

Thus said H P Lovecraft in his rolling survey of the form, "Supernatural Horror in Literature", written between 1925 and 1934.

Well the object here is very much the building, and what happens there is abnormal to the ultimate degree.  Those who know Hodgson only for the Carnacki stories or his innumerable tales of the Sargasso, are missing out.  Borderland prefigures his final novel, The Night Land, which even Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith felt 'went a bit too far'.  It might have been written in 1907 (see 'the editor's' introduction) but in many ways it could easily have come from the acid-ridden 1960s.

It starts traditionally enough.  Two Victorian chaps take a holiday in the far West of Ireland.  There they stumble upon the ruined, abandoned house, perched precariously on an unstable rock platform over a huge bottomless abyss.  In the rubble inside the house they find a damaged manuscript written by the last owner, a nameless recluse.  We do not know when the manuscript was written or when the house was abandoned, and very soon the issue of time becomes irrelevant.

The recluse describes how he was sitting in his study late one night when he felt himself being borne up and away by invisible forces, into space and out of the solar system.  In another part of the galaxy he visits a planet where he finds a massive replica of his house hewn out of green stone, standing on the border of the Silence.  He wakes back in his study and finds that nothing has changed.  Or has it?

Part of his garden is carried away in a landslip.  The pit begins to form.  Creatures emerge and attack the house, which the recluse now realises stands on the border between dimensions.

A good third of the book is taken up with a second out-of-body experience in which he seems to live forever, so long that he sees and survives the death of the sun itself.  He seems to wake, but---

Unique for its day and very much a precursor of modern visionary sci fi, this book essentially defines the term 'fantastic fiction'.  A must-read for any student of the genre.

And what, for the record, did Lovecraft think of The House on the Borderland?  Why, this---

The House on the Borderland (1908) - perhaps the greatest of all Mr Hodgson's works - tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms the focus for hideous other-world forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below.  The wanderings of the narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature.  And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery.  But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

I'd quibble with the last sentence - Lovecraft, understandably, had no knowledge of Hodgson's love life, which I see mirrored in the recluse's reunion with his lost love in the second vision - but otherwise, I think he pretty much covers all the bases.  And I'd forgive him almost anything in return for the word kalpas, albeit Lovecraft borrows it from Hodgson's book.

My latest and shortest short story appeared on www.smashwords.com last night and got 25 downloads in the first twelve hours.  That's the best response I've had thus far.  Thanks to one and all!  As for the rest of you ... what are you waiting for?

Carnacki the Ghost-Finder - William Hope Hodgson

Hodgson was killed in action in 1918.  He had never known huge literary success but was instantly forgotten in death.  The mighty Lovecraft tried to revive interest after more than a decade, and he succeeded insofar as August Derleth, king of horror pulp, continued to extol Hodgson's work.  Dennis Wheatley referenced him in The Devil Rides Out (in exactly the same way I reference him in my forthcoming short story on www.smashwords.com) but it was Hugh Greene who finally rescued him in his Rivals of Sherlock Holmes collections in the early Seventies.  Obviously Carnacki was not a detective as we like to think of Holmes, but actually the Holmes stories aren't that clever, they just seem so, and actually Carnacki would be entirely at home in The Hound of the Baskervilles or 'The Speckled Band'.  Anyway, Hodgson's works returned to print and have remained so.  This particular edition came out in 1980 and includes all the original Carnacki tales from 1913 and a couple of additions of dubious quality and/or pedigree.

To deal with the latter first. 'The Find' is crud, has nothing to do with ghost-finding and was probably abandoned by the author.  That author, though, was undoubtedly Hodgson, which is more than can be said about 'The Hog'.  This is a good story but much longer than the others and may well be the work of the aforementioned Derleth.  I am unsure.  If it is a pastiche or continuation it's a good one.  Perhaps Hodgson was trying to write a full-length Carnacki but couldn't get past a novella.

For the undoubted originals, the premise is always the same.  Carnacki invites four male friends round to his flat in Cheyne Walk, gives them supper and then regales them with an account of an investigation.  Some are paranormal, others fakes.  The best, 'The Horse of the Invisible', is both, a clever trick indeed.  I also liked 'The Whistling Room', which features a type of entity I've never come across before.  Hodgson's style is of its period.  He first published the stories in The Idler magazine in 1910, which gives me a chance to include an image from the magazine---

---and the house literary style is used.  It wasn't actually Hodgson's usual style.  An ex-seaman himself, his forte was the eerie sea yarn, more often than not written in oo-ar-matey style.  I reacquainted myself with Hodgson recently through his Sargasso Seas series.  There is one such here, 'The Haunted JARVEE', which is probably my third favourite.

In summary, then, definitely a classic of its genre, and inspirational, in my case at least. 'Carnacki: The Saiitii Manifestation' will shortly be available for free download.